March 2014

I am too young to clothe myself in mourning black.A little mirror image of he who takes the living from the world.I’ve hidden away the person that I was –In a shroud of dark that drifts through streets withBeagle eyes, ever-edged with tears, I drudgeWith nothing to carry but thoughts of youLike dumb bells that clang and drag meTo keep me in stride with this heavy heaving heart.

Ahhhh, O-Week. A chance to kill off a few brain cells before the readings pile up, right? Not necessarily. On the last night of O-Week, Nura Gili hosted a screening of John Pilger’s new documentary Utopia, which was a welcome change from the usual drinking and society events. The film is a reminder of the history we as Australians frequently overlook. Much like the Chinese government has blanked Tiananmen Square from the history books, the true history of Indigenous Australia is barely covered in the syllabus, nor are we really ever taught the true extent of maltreatment and oppression of the first Australians – both in the past and as we speak.

On the outside, Sphero is a small, durable, Bluetooth-enabled ball made of plastic that can light itself up and roll itself around. On the inside, there’s a soft, creamy centre… er, I mean, there’s a bunch of accelerometers inside, so it knows where it is and which way it’s pointing – the same stuff that makes your phone screen rotate when you don’t want it to.

You pair Sphero up with your phone and download apps you can use to make it do cool things. This is Sphero’s strong point, but it also makes it feel like it’s a solution in search of a problem.

When Dean Mattar was one of UNSW’s Queer Officers last year, he was disturbed by accounts of queer students facing violence.

“There have been many times where I had to help fill out apprehension of violence orders, or book taxis for students because they didn’t feel safe going home, and there were many times when I had calls from hospitals…that linked on to issues of bullying on campus,” he says.

It’s the newest game in town; the craze that has engaged the youth; the word on everybody’s lips. I’ve got it, you’ve got it, and your mum is probably downloading the latest update for it now. It’s Tinder, and it’s been matched with a good chunk of the human population.

This app-based phenomenon is spoken about openly in every bar, university library, coffee queue and train station. Anyone from 18 to (let’s say) 50 has a profile, usually with either a misspelt byline or whimsical quote and a handful of pixilated selfies or, stupidly, a picture with their ex-partner. It’s that trendy that if it isn’t mentioned in an upcoming episode of Girls, I’ll eat my hat.*

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the most extraordinarily clever way to subdue and assert domination over the feminine under the untouchable guise of “cultural practice”. FGM is not only a symbolic attack; it’s a clever little combination of assault upon mind and body, woven into a tapestry of ancient cultural tradition. The concept of her womanhood, and the details of her psyche, are shaped and restrained with the wave of a knife in between her legs at an age at which she cannot protest.

This opinion, I have come to, through a point of reason and compassion, rather than a sense of western cultural superiority. To allow for any cultural wriggle-room on the issue is nothing more than an intellectualism of one of the wickedest forms of subjugation existing today.